Proceedings of the 14th annual ACM international conference on Multimedia

Santa Barbara, CA, USA

SESSION: Arts session 3: tools for creativity and art analysis

Pages: 519 - 528

Year of Publication: 2006

ISBN:1-59593-447-2

Authors

Steve Mann University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Ryan Janzen University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Mark Post University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

ACM: Association for Computing Machinery
SIGMULTIMEDIA: ACM Special Interest Group on Multimedia

Publisher
ACM Press New York, NY, USA

ABSTRACT

We present a musical keyboard that is not only velocity-sensitive, but
in fact responds to absement (presement), displacement (placement),
velocity, acceleration, jerk, jounce, etc. (i.e. to all the
derivatives, as well as the integral, of displacement).Moreover,
unlike a piano keyboard in which the keys reach a point of maximal
displacement, our keys are essentially infinite in length, and thus
never reach an end to their key travel. Our infinite length keys are
achieved by using water jet streams that continue to flow past the
fingers of a person playing the instrument. The instrument takes the
form of a pipe with a row of holes, in which water flows out of each
hole, while a user is invited to play the instrument by interfering
with the flow of water coming out of the holes. The instrument
resembles a large flute, but, unlike a flute, there is no complicated
fingering pattern. Instead, each hole (each water jet) corresponds to
one note (as with a piano or pipe organ). Therefore, unlike a flute,
chords can be played by blocking more than one water jet hole at the
same time. Because each note corresponds to only one hole, different
fingers of the musician can be inserted into, onto, around, or near
several of the instrument's many water jet holes, in a variety of
different ways, resulting in an ability to independently control the
way in which each note in a chord sounds.Thus the hydraulophone
combines the intricate embouchure control of woodwind instruments with
the polyphony of keyboard instruments.Various forms of our instrument
include totally acoustic, totally electronic, as well as hybrid
instruments that are acoustic but also include an interface to a
multimedia computer to produce a mixture of sounds that are produced
by the acoustic properties of water screeching through orific plates,
as well as synthesized sounds.

S. Mann. "fluid streams": fountains that are keyboards with
nozzle spray as keys that give rich tactile feedback and are more
expressive and more fun than plastic keys. In Proceedings of the 13th
annual ACM international conference on Multimedia, pages 181 -- 190,
Hilton, Singapore, 2005.